LATEST AWARD

1889 engraving of the California Hotel, where Parker plied his trade as a barber. The building was lost a few months later in Spokane’s Great Fire, but the Parker family endured. Image from Spokane Falls Illustrated (1889).

Sometime before 1885, J. Bryson Parker, a barber by trade, moved from Nevada to set up shop in the booming frontier community of Spokane Falls in the Washington Territory. Parker was African American, listed in the 1885 census as “mulatto,” a term which in those days meant someone whose ancestors were both black and white.

In 1971 Charles Manson was convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder of seven people that were part of a cult he led in southern California. It was a gruesome crime that garnered national attention but it was not Manson’s first contact with the courts.